Further Reading

When the game's servers went live at 12:01am Eastern time, many PC and Xbox One players immediatelystartedposting that they were getting stuck on the "initializing" or "attempting connection" screen. The Titanfall team quickly tweeted and posted a message to the EA Help board saying that they were aware of problems with "longer than usual load times" and were "working on a solution." In the interim, the developers suggested that players caught on the login screen should simply back out and try again, which resulted in mixed success, according to online reports from players.

With the troubled server situations at launch for EA's SimCity reboot and Battlefield 4 still fresh in their memories, many assumed they were in the midst of yet another online game launching without the needed infrastructure. "Reminds me of the Diablo [3] launch, error 37," wrote one forum-goer. "I knew I should not have been the guinea pig on this one. IT team and any executives should be fired," wrote another.

That last comment in particular may have been a bit premature, as a backend patch rolled out just before 2am EDT seems to have fixed most of the login issues (the original version of this post incorrectly stated this was a downloadable client-side patch. Ars regrets the error). "Things are starting to recover quickly now," Titanfall developer Jon Shiring tweeted after the patch was launched. "You should get onto that Private Lobby server much faster soon."

Indeed, it's much harder to find online reports of connection problems timestamped after the rollout of the patch, with forum posts largely shifting to gameplay discussion (and the inevitable accusations of cheating). Ars staffers who ran into problems at launch time are now able to log in just fine as well, though there are apparently still some issues connecting with Belkin routers, according to the Titanfall Twitter feed (players may also need to open certain router ports).

Unlike EA's previous troubled games, Titanfall is running on top of Microsoft's Azure cloud server architecture. That should theoretically provide plenty of overhead for even busy server load times, but has also meant a lack of any connection options in South Africa.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl